The Metcalfe Family Album: Six Generations of Traditions and Memories - Hardcover

PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY When Jan Andersen, raised in a lonely, single-parent household, marries into the Metcalfe clan, she is given responsibility, as the "new mistress," for the Metcalfe Family Album, which has documented the clan's life, updated virtually every Christmas, since 1835. The lavishly illustrated book, which simulates a real album in appearance and layout is a melange of sepia-toned pages, old-fashioned photographs, letters, recipes, crafts and memorabilia. It follows six generations of women, beginning with Marianne, who arrives from France alone at age 12, later marrying Joshua Metcalfe and settling in Georgetown, Ind. There she begins the album, a record of life events, household chores and favorite recipes--"even a few thoughts and feelings. Successive diarists are women who marry Metcalfe sons and add their stories: starchy Constance; German-born, Vassar-educated feminist Anna; shy but spirited Irish Kathleen; British war-bride Jessie: and finally Jan, taking the reader through 1996. The book should please readers who enjoy the comfort of family continuity and the calm treasures of hearth and home.KIRKUS REVIEWS Deceptively packaged, this book presents itself as one of those finds beloved of historians--"the untouched trunk in the attic full of journals, letters, and souvenirs. It is, in fact, a work of the imagination, pretending to cover the memories of six generations of women on an Indiana homestead.Here's the concept: Marianne, a French aristocrat, marries pioneer Joshua Metcalfe in 1835 and happily departs for the Indiana wilderness to chop wood, draw water, tend chickens, clean, and cook. She also sets the scene for a family Christmas whosetraditions will continue to the present. Another tradition: an end-of-year journal summing up annual events and picked up by succeeding generations, usually daughters-in-law of different ethnic background--"German, Irish, English, Swedish--"who can add cultural variations to the Christmas celebrations and reflect in their annual summations the progress of civilization at the farm: indoor plumbing, electricity, automobiles, computers.Beautifully published, with each woman's entries in a different handwriting and authentic-looking photographs and memorabilia reproduced, here's a charming reconstruction of the flow of history as it affects one particular family.PAT HOLT'S UNCENSORED One might dismiss this family album of annual writings by six generations of Indiana women as gimmicky soap opera meant to pander to that penchant for melodrama in us all - except that it's been researched so impeccably by former BBC producer/Indiana transplant Murphey that every page seems steeped in the kind of history that is rarely told yet always valued.Begun in 1934, when a feisty young Frenchwoman, Marianne Metcalfe, throws a fit that her pioneer husband has loaded gunpowder instead of her fine linens on the wagon taking them West to Indiana, this is the kind of album that's handed down, and increasingly loaded down, with reminiscences, recipes, postcards, labels, photographs, invitations, swatches and even a love letter we can pull out and read from a World War I doctor who encloses rose petals from the trenches.Each narrative is presented in a different type that evokes the handwiting style of the period, and each woman's personality seems to emerge through the trappings of her time.Thus we learn of Anna's thrill at playing "a Victor Victrola talking machine" in 1908, and Jessie's introduction to the family farm of "a fridge-freezer and, for the first time in its history, a dishwashing machine" in 1959.While it can be enthralling to follow the adventures of characters from early childhood to old age and decline, Murphey's penchant for tragic deaths, romantic themes and womanly self-sacrifice can grow mawkish and burdensome as each the family reinvents itself. But the package is so beautifully produced and the how-to portions often so intriguing (Katie's tie-dyeing instructions of 1968 will be nostalgic for some) that the story gains in universal appeal.

Drawing on America's immigrant heritage (the ethnic traditions represented are French, Dutch, German, Russian, Irish, English, Swedish and Italian) this is a portrait of history as it is lived by ordinary people.